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The 2024 General Counsel Report Part 3: Environmental, Social and Governance Joins Data Privacy as Top Legal Department Issue

Digital risk has triggered a fundamental shift in the corporate legal department. Against a tremulous cultural, economic and geopolitical backdrop, numerous issues have cascaded into tipping points across the legal function. Data-centered regulatory activity, privacy requirements, generative artificial intelligence disruption, technology advancement and an expansive web of emerging data sources are now impacting the way legal departments prioritize resources. In addition to placing tremendous demand on in-house counsel, this environment has led to a decline in the general counsel’s feelings of preparedness for every major risk category.

How Compliance and Risk Officers Can Balance the Benefits and Risks of AI in Compliance

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries and the way we interpret data, with generative AI leading as a groundbreaking subfield. Generative AI offers immense potential for streamlining numerous compliance functions and operations. However, these advances also come with significant compliance challenges and digital risks. Without diligent oversight, poor application of generative AI technologies can open organizations up to significant corporate compliance, regulatory, litigation, and reputational risks. This white paper explores the role generative AI may play in reshaping organizational approaches to risk and compliance. It will discuss ways corporate compliance officers can proactively mitigate risks and enable an approach of informed and vigilant adoption.

Forecasting Digital Risk in 2024

After a feverish period of disruption across many facets of technology, it’s becoming more difficult to delineate between what could happen and what will happen in the months and year ahead. Business leaders often rely upon industry forecasts to prepare for anticipated change that is likely to impact their operations, go-to-market strategies, hiring plans, etc. Yet in a hype-filled environment in which it seems like anything is possible, organizations must be highly discerning about how they prepare for evolving digital risk and establish resilience for future technological disruption.

Digital Transformation: Leveraging Technology to Improve Legal Outcomes

Organizational change is never easy, but for corporate legal teams tasked with simultaneously mitigating risk and enabling business growth — all within the boundaries of the law — the struggle can be very real, especially amid expectations to rapidly adopt and align emerging technologies. While it would be difficult today to find an in-house legal team that isn’t using some kind of tech solution to create and drive efficiencies, automate repetitive tasks, and improve workflows, comprehensive digital transformation is still considered a work in progress for many organizations.

UAE Financial Crime and Investigations Pulse Check

A recent announcement from the United Arab Emirates attorney general confirmed the government is moving forward with plans to establish special prosecution entities for financial crimes. This step is a continuation and escalation of the UAE’s efforts to increase investigations and prosecutions into abuse of the financial sector and other ancillary channels of illicit flows. It also aligns to the government’s “Forward Economy” and “Forward Ecosystem” strategies to advance as a global leader in economic and judicial strength.

The ABC (D and E) of Technology for Effective Investigations

Investigations today often involve millions of documents and records originating from tens or hundreds of disparate data sources. In complex, high-stakes investigations, manual processes and reluctance to leverage advanced tools to find key information from within large, diverse data sets are causing excessive time, cost and complexity in bringing matters to a swift and defensible conclusion. The use of technology has become essential in responding to modern investigations and catching problems as they arise. However, advanced tools must be applied in a standardised, documented and defensible manner in order for findings to stand up to scrutiny among regulatory authorities and the courts.

Regulatory Scrutiny of Off-Channel Communications, Emerging Data Sources Heightens Governance and Compliance Risks

A broad cross-section of regulatory activity underscores just how valuable and risky data has become in the current business environment. More pointedly, scrutiny over “off-channel communications,” or “emerging data sources,” such as modern communications tools, collaboration platforms, personal devices and chat applications, is intensifying worldwide. U.S. authorities including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice have released new requirements surrounding the governance of emerging data sources and have implemented severe penalties against financial services institutions that have failed to properly preserve, monitor and manage off-channel communications.

Bad Tapes

Once touted as the pinnacle of long-term data storage, magnetic backup tapes have evolved into a data albatross around the necks of corporate Australia. Storage costs, difficulty of data retrieval and the threat of regulatory action due to data over-retention loom over companies which continue to retain backup tapes as a permanent archive.

Delivering on the Promise of “Cradle-to-Grave” Data Management in Large Financial Institutions

Financial institutions are grappling with significant, ongoing challenges in their management of valuable communications data. These challenges are driven by accelerated technology change, a wholesale shift to cloud platforms and many long-lasting changes in working practices and behaviors post-COVID. Financial institutions have experienced a seismic shift from an era where all communications data was stored in centralized servers within the walls of its enterprise data centers. Now, email, chat, voice and video along with other dynamic forms of collaborative content, is stored across a myriad of third-party communications channels and cloud-based platforms outside the perimeter of the enterprise.

Compliance Tech Priorities in 2023

Respondents to a survey conducted by Compliance Week and FTI Consulting largely indicated third parties to be the most heightened area of risk to their businesses this year, with reporting and dashboarding and enhancing analytics capabilities among top priorities.

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